constipation

 So younger in life before 40, my digestion seemed relatively straightforward. Food went in and food came out and a relatively orderly fashion. But when I got into my 40s I started getting constipation. I would eat and stuff wouldn't come out right away. And it would back up and get hard. And then it was painful to take a dump. There were three occasions when this got to be sort of critical. So here's what I've done to help the situation 20 years later. This is been sort of a learning journey especially for the last 5 years. Years ago I started drinking more alcohol which seemed to help some, and alcohol can be part of the equation. But here's my basic take on it now.

The two most critical things to do or take fiber and do the s*** dance. You can pray all day long and maybe your prayers do better in the throne room of God than mine do but my prayers didn't really go very far in the throne room. I don't know if God was busy scheduling his next golf game or what was going on but I just didn't get very much attention. So take fiber I take metamucil and benefiber. Both of these products seem to work pretty well, metamucil does work a little better. The other thing is the s*** dance. Some people will call it getting enough exercise, but this is not just exercise. This is the s*** dance. So this isn't a fence to any particular group of people or anything but basically the s*** dance sort of looks like what American Indians used to do around the campfire but you push against your abdomen area gently with your hands. You start over on the lower right side where your appendix is and you work up to your rib cage across to your left rib cage and then down past your navel to your lower hip bone basically. And you may massage a little bit on the lower hip bone side. This follows the basic path of the large intestine. You do this 5 minutes twice a day. Usually I weighed about 2 hours after eating a meal. So maybe 10:00 in the morning and 8:00 at night. This really has been a fairly good answer to my problem. If you skip either one of these though you're going to have a little harder time of it. And alcohol does seem to help, and reducing stress is important but frankly my life is largely stress-free and I still get constipated without doing the s*** dance and fiber.

 Why doesn't the Bible talk about this? It seems that God is somewhat sarcastic or hostile about our desire to eat delicious food. If you look in the book of Exodus and out in the desert, God is repeatedly offended by people wanting a decent meal. And God talks about people lusting after food. Well I don't know about you, but food helps keep me alive. Now Jesus made the point that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, and I have never missed a meal that I didn't want to miss, but I find food comforting, and it helps sustain my life. Also it tastes good. I'm not sure why God is offended by all of this.

 It doesn't appear that there are any Bible verses that talk about constipation or how to avoid it. There is one verse somewhere that talks about men looking like they're holding their abdomen like they're giving birth like a woman or something I'll have to look that up, but as far as I can tell it doesn't really talk about constipation.

Here it is, you can click on it:

Isa.13

1. [8] And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.